My parents sold our house last week.
Now, this wasn’t a complete surprise. Not in the least. My parents have been talking about moving to Pittsburgh for my dad’s job since I was in probably seventh grade. But they promised they’d wait until my older brother graduated from high school, and then until I graduated. Now that I’m in my second year of college, the move was more or less inevitable.
But that doesn’t make me feel any less weird about it (weird isn’t quite the right word there, but I think it’s pretty close).
We moved into this house when I was eight years old. I learned how to jump rope in the basement. I sat in my room and wrote in a diary about my sixth grade crush. I had friends over for countless sleepovers. I can navigate from my bed to the kitchen for a snack in the pitch black. I’ve spent hours and hours splayed out in my hammock in the backyard.
Yes, I know that, even if my parents weren’t moving, I still would be in a few short years. I only really ever live here during summers and brief breaks throughout the year. But still.
It’s home.
And now we’re going somewhere new.
I’ve never lived in the city before. I’ve spent my entire life on the edge of small towns that are a couple hours away from a big city. I know a lot of people at Kenyon sigh and wonder how someone could live in a place as remote as Knox County, but I think the exact same about your lives of suburbs and downtowns.
More than just leaving the home I’ve known for a decade, we’re also moving somewhere terrifyingly different from what I’m used to. I’ve always figured I’d live in a big city, but anytime I thought about that, it was in the vague future of “when I grow up.” But now, that vague future has become “in a month and a half.” Even as we’ve been planning the move these last few months, it was in the terms of “sometime this summer.” There’s something about that phrasing that seems a world away from “maybe a week after you finish finals, maybe sooner.”
It’s going to be a big transition, to say the least.
Now, all this nervousness isn’t to say that I’m not excited for the move. A summer in Pittsburgh will surely help ease the transition to whatever city I end up in after graduation. There are all kinds of job and internship possibilities there that simply weren’t an option where we live now. I’ll have the chance to go to museums and see indie movies and do who even knows what else — things that just don’t come to small towns on the edge of Appalachia.
Moving to Pittsburgh will be good for me, and — once we get past the bickering of what counts as decorations and what verges on hoarding — it will be good for my family.
But I’m still allowed to be excited and nervous/scared/wary all at the same time, though. Because, honestly, that’s how I feel about most changes, even though I know it will work out in the end.
So here’s to change, I suppose, as terrifying as it may be.
Photos: Zillow, Trip Advisor